Since they’ve been gone, B-Mor has not been the same place. We have mentioned the murals featuring their portraits, guerrilla-painted under cover of night, with other less prominent notations around the blocks becoming more and more a part of our everyday life. Does it seem that the streets these days are more frequently blemished, at least between the twice-daily sweepings, by the litter of bottle tops and taco wrappers and, amazing to say, gobs of spit (the habit of expectorating long thought eradicated after countless years of education and social reinforcement!), or that the queues at the movie theaters and school sporting events aren’t as orderly as you expect, distinctly more wedge than file, or that even inside the grow facilities, where nothing so much as a few liters of deviation is tolerated in those massive tanks, significant numbers of fry fish have been going missing, presumably to be nurtured in illegal home nurseries.
Just the other week an older fellow and his wife were caught by inspectors of the directorate with a catfish-raising operation set up in their basement; they were visited because of what the inspectors believed was a faulty water meter, and when they were led down to the basement by an unknowing child, they could hardly believe the elaborate thicket of tubs and piping and filters filling the room right up to the ceiling. To spare the rest of their household the old couple took full responsibility, immediately sacrificing themselves, and when asked how they thought they could get away with such a blatant violation, the wife purportedly said, We knew it couldn’t last, but who cares anyway.
Who cares anyway?
This is a startling attitude, one that you might not even hear muttered by some preternaturally indolent, thrice-rejected facilities applicant whose only remaining choices are a janitorial position at the shopping mall and a potentially hazardous job at the wastewater treatment plants. But so baldly voiced, and then by a fish tank alumna, whose pension is modest but certainly adequate and forever secure? This amazes. Enough to make one think ahead to a perhaps inevitable epoch, when the character and disposition of this place might have changed so profoundly as to be untenable. Don’t sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?
Reg, of course, was not one to entertain such ideations. It wasn’t in his makeup. What he possessed instead, it is now clear, was much rarer, something that occurs in B-Mor and other cousin settlements maybe only a few times in a generation, if at all.
For Reg, the rumor goes, was C-free.
Yes, it is hard to believe.
Our gangly, bumbling, perennially smiling Reg. Free of the curse! Free of any rogue neoplasms, in either fact or destiny. Naturally, there is a record of every inhabitant’s annual blood panel, which unlike the general physicals have not been suspended, protein, sugar, fat, hormone, vitamin, and numerous other levels collected and tabulated to track and identify trends across the B-Mor population, rather than any individual’s state of health; but always included are tests for known markers of disease. Eventually everyone will express it, the blood panels show this, unless they’re done in by something else, like poor young drowned Joseph or stroke-afflicted Ruby. Our tainted world looms within us, every one.
Most Charters can afford the latest drugs and interventional therapies, such that very few perish directly from a form of the disease; on average they live quite a bit longer than we do, ten or so years. But most will succumb instead to something known as the Crash, a degenerative condition in which the major organs begin to fail, one after another, caused by the accrued ill side effects of the serial therapies, or maybe the therapies themselves (no one really knows, though study has been continuous), until complete shutdown ensues, and there’s nothing left to be done. We suppose that there are a few of us who would, given the means, endure the serial treatments and procedures that Charters now consider a natural part of the experience of life, applied measure after measure, each one increasingly heroic. That what remains of our dwindling resources should be devoted by all rights to you, or you.
The rest of us, however, recognize the advantages of not knowing when one’s day will come. Better to be fine up to the moment a severe fever or backache or rash flares up and lingers, when it’s too late for anything but the quiet room of palliatives, the kind lantern of a picture viewer, and steady visitations from one’s kin and closest friends, whose tears flow not so much in sadness as prideful recognition of your role in the legacy of our cadre. For you have done your job, you have labored and nurtured, you have helped secure the foundations of B-Mor in this fraught civilization without heed to your own dreams, ever modest, unfinished.
And you will never die alone, something that even Charters cannot say, what with how intent they are to outlive one another.
But to pass from mere old age! To drift away in one’s sleep or pull up a chair at the food court with the not-quite-idle thought, I’ll just shut my eyes for a second. What a blessing that must be for one and all. And to think that Reg might have that chance, indeed, makes sense in the way of a karmic embodiment, in that he was an exceedingly ingenuous soul, a true babe of the woods whose striking sandy-hazel eyes cast more broad sheen than sparkle.
In fact, it’s funny that Reg should end up being the one who was so cellularly pure. The lines of his family, the Xi-Jang clan, go back right to the beginning of B-Mor, the Jangs among the originals who landed in the destitute city that very first hour. After the initial period of strife with the handful of remaining inhabitants finally died down, one of the Jang boys fell in love with a girl from one of the holdout native families, surname Willis, and married her, producing several children. There’s no record of further mixing for the Jangs, just an extensive linking during those early years with the Xi clan of Shining Tomorrow Road, but there are inevitable jokes and snickerings about certain undiluted features that show up in every generation of the clan, like Reg’s amazing head of Afro-type hair, which clearly derive from that Willis girl.
How indelible, blood. Which is why, after Reg went missing, the rest of his household was apparently shuttled by special bus to the clinic for a few days of testing and retesting, everyone from the walker-ambling grannies to the swaddled babes scanned and pricked, and closely observed afterward by platoons of purple-jumpsuited Charter researchers seeking to determine whether some clan practice of hygiene or domiciling or even cuisine could somehow explain the perfect anomaly of Reg. They couldn’t, though every so often we will hear that the younger Xi-Jangs have been summoned from whatever facility or mall where they might be and bused to the clinic for ultimately fruitless examinations, going so far as to corral other B-Mor clans whose members are believed to have certain genetic filaments woven through their beings. Word of this quickly spread, presumably to the negative, but now one hears that among those of Fan’s and Reg’s age, in the midst of their prime marrying years, the more “native-looking” young B-Mors have become remarkably popular.
This, needless to say, is an ironic development. It is astounding that one could ever imagine that the dance clubs and tearooms and game parlors would be dotted by young men who visited the ladies’ salons to have their hair teased wildly à la Reg, or that there would be a companion run by both sexes on bronzers at the pharmacy, or that the prevailing style of outerwear would feature something called a hoodie, which some enterprising teen discovered in the vid archives and had his mother design and produced in a counties factory (and sold by the dozen, like cinnamon-sugar malasadas), and which transforms any respectable, demure person into a shifty, slump-shouldered gnome.